Dreaming in Books
The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age
At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era's "bookish" culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.
Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, "Dreaming in Books" tells a wide-ranging story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book's rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.
About the Author
Andrew Piper is professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the author of "Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age" and "Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times", both published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also a founding member of the Multigraph Collective, a group of twenty-two scholars that recently published "Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation", also with the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"Andrew Piper has written a book about the nineteenth century's romance with books, looking at the many ways in which the physical character of a book and its illustrations shaped a reader's avidity. Piper's scholarly history is fueled by a bookish ardor – you can feel the love that went into his footnotes. This writer's thinking comes straight out of the long afternoons he must have spent in the library, pulling book after book off the shelves, experiencing the power not only of words but also of bindings, typefaces, and illustrations" – Jed Perl | The New Republic
"Beyond its value as a contribution to the broader history of the book, Piper's relational study of the book aims to reassess today's pervasive discourse of anxiety about the end of book culture in the digital age, suggesting instead that the book and the computer (along with other media) have existed and will continue to coexist side by side" – ACLA, Harry Levin Prize Citation, 2011 runner-up
